Monster Hunter World starter guide: everything you need to know to get hunting

Collect everything

Seriously, pick up every single thing that your Scoutflies highlight. Herbs and honey are especially useful, as you can use them to create health potions. Berries can be used for Slinger ammo or for crafting ammunition for ranged weapons. Ores - which look like blue crystals jutting out of a rockface - will inevitably come in handy too, considering they’re used as components in crafting armour and weapons.

Investigate every track

Green glowy footprints are a common sight when you’re out on an expedition or hunting a monster for a main quest. Investigate them enough and soon you’ll be able to tell what sort of monster made them, but don’t ignore them once you get to that point. If you keep researching them (i.e. when you press circle when you’re beside them) you’ll get so good at identifying tracks that your Scoutflies will lead you directly to the beast instead of just showing you its footprints.

There’s no fall damage

Yup, you read that right. So when you decide you can’t be arsed to climb down a massive wall of vines or need to get somewhere below you very quickly, just hurl yourself over the edge. Just don’t do the same in real life. Or you’ll end up with two very broken knees. Not a good look.

Collect loot fast by pressing X or circle

Once your battle is over, don’t take a breath. That sounds harsh, but the timer is literally ticking and there’s only a certain amount of seconds before you’ll be booted back to the hub world. Fallen beasts have plenty of resources ripe for harvesting, which you’ll do by pressing circle. But instead of mashing it, if you hold it down your Hunter will harvest everything in one go instead of making you press it repeatedly for each new resource you find. And when you’re looking at all the loot you’ve gained before you go back to base, you don’t have to hit X on every item to stash it away in your box. Just hold down X and you’ll scoop it all up quicker than you can say Monster Loot.